There are essentially two ways to view the modern world.
1. The misanthropic lens
Through this lens, roughly half of humanity consists of ruthless, selfish bastards. Anyone who, during one of the largest genocides in history, still manages to vote the perpetrators into second place fits seamlessly into that worldview. It’s tempting to conclude, from this perspective, that there is little hope left for such people.
2. The hall-of-mirrors perspective
Here, the problem isn’t a sudden moral decline of the masses, but the infrastructure that filters our perception. On platforms like Twitter/X, the majority of so-called ‘public opinion’ is a carefully constructed echo chamber operated by propaganda bots. Only politicians and other professional optimists still seem to believe that these timelines are mostly populated by real people. This is precisely where the toxicity of social media lies: our evolutionary brain struggles to distinguish between authentic and synthetic voices. The rational mind can do so, but it’s rarely activated during the passive scrolling—the spectacle of moral outrage captures attention far more easily than calm analysis.
If most of the toxic noise is artificial, then humanity is not inherently depraved—the channel is corrupted.
When we pierce through the illusion of an artificial majority, the real majority turns out to be remarkably reasonable, empathetic, and mostly busy with their own lives. The problem has never been that humanity suddenly spiraled out of control; the problem is that a handful of poorly designed systems continuously presents us with an image of a derailed humanity. Once we understand this, the question shifts from “What is still good about humanity?” to “How do we fix the medium through which we understand each other?”—a question that at least offers hope for a solution.
Your brain automatically perceives all those Mossad bots with their shouty posts as ‘real people’, even when you rationally know better. This is the core secret of all propaganda: repetition alone is enough to make something ‘true’ in the human psyche.
I’ve long since given up hope that politicians will ever become less foolish. What can you do in the face of a horror like last night’s song contest?
Hold your own song contest—with a protest song:
Keep the children away
from the terror of the news today
get rid of the television
let them play with trees,
have vision.
What is wrong with people nowadays?
If Orwell was alive he’d say
Look, a boot is stomping a face.
Is that all we can do as a human race?
Does my heart have the right
to defend itself?
Against the cold propaganda
of your hell?
Do my ears have the right
to defend themselves?
From the bombs and the cries
of the unwell?
In the quiet of the night
I hear the whispered fears
of those held dear.
Turn off the screens,
close the doors
let the mind wander,
let the spirit soar.
Have compassion.
Let’s spend it in this world
so heavy-handed…
Does my heart have the right
to defend itself?
Against the cold propaganda
of your hell?
Do my ears have the right
to defend themselves?
Beyond the lies.
Beyond the world of lies.
(C) Martijn Benders & Kroes den Bock
Your job now is to pry your brain free from the malevolent illusion that a depraved humanity is in power. There certainly is something corrupt in power, no doubt, but it isn’t ‘humanity’. Not by a long shot.
As the videos by Left Laser demonstrate, there are indeed real people out there spreading psychotic viewpoints—but they are outliers, religious crazies that no one should take seriously.
Yesterday I saw my childhood neighbor Berry Sanders—who has since become a very good artist—speak out against genocide on Facebook. Below that, a typical reply popped up from someone eager to point out that surely, not everyone in Israel should be painted with the same brush, as if calling out genocide requires a disclaimer. I replied by saying that Germans can be very nice people, although there are rumors of concentration camps here and there.
After that, a palpable silence fell. If you put that person—say, in a confidential confessional booth—and asked what he really thinks, he’d probably say the most kind and mild things. But these are never spoken openly. This paradox—speaking truth behind closed doors but not in front of the community—is what Michel Foucault called Christian parrhesia: a form of truth-telling limited to confession, aimed at personal purification rather than public dissent.
Over a thousand years of church history, this confessional reflex has become so deeply embedded that it is no longer tied to any religious affiliation. Even in a largely secular population, the logic of the confessional remains: criticism is allowed, as long as it stays intimate, guilt-laden, and securely contained. The result is a strange vacuum: public silence maintains the illusion of consensus, while the real debate hides in private chats, anonymous surveys, and DM threads.
Martijn Benders, May 18, 2025